The
Sunlight of Love
A
little four year old girl was dying of a very rare disease. Her one
hope was in having a blood transfusion, and the only possible person
who could give matching blood was her six year old brother. The pediatrician
handling the case talked very sensitively to the little boy. "Your
little sister is very sick" she said, "and we think that
if we can take out some of your blood and put it into her it might
make her better. Would you be willing to let us take it?" The
little boy paused for a moment and then nodded his head in consent.
A few days later when the little boy came back with his parents to
visit his sister they met the pediatrician. She said to him, "It
is so wonderful! Your blood saved your sister, she is going to be
all right now." But the little boy's eyes filled with tears and
he burst out crying. The doctor asked him what was wrong? "When"
he asked her, "am I going to die?" All the time he had believed
that he himself was going to die in giving his blood for his little
sister but he had been willing to do it!
Today's
Gospel tells us of this kind of love, "God so loved the world
that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him may not be
lost, but may have eternal life." Believing in that Son and in
that Father is not always easy. The world which God made has this
wonderful system of regeneration and rejuvenation of birth and death
and of the coming of new life. This happens in the plant, animal and
human kingdom as well as in the earth itself. While one part of the
world is eroding, lahar is being spewed out from the bowels of the
earth to provide fertile soil for future generations. But this wonderful
process is often devastating and painful for those who get caught
up in it. For the people who lose property and loved ones in a volcanic
eruption, for those who lose relatives and even children in death,
for those who suffer because of people's destruction of the ecology;
it is hard - it is indeed impossible - to see the master plan of God
behind it all. But God so loved the world that even though he could
not change the system in which the world worked he showed that he
was not cold hearted and indifferent. He sent his own son to be part
of that world and to himself suffer grievously. The Christ whom he
sent showed us by word and example where our freedom lay; in suffering
gracefully in the face of the inevitable.
Jesus
came into the world as a light - "but people loved the darkness
rather than the light because their deeds were evil. For whoever does
wrong hates the evil and does not come into the light for fear that
his deeds will be shown to be evil."
For
most people rats are symbols of the dirty and the hidden. Recently,
I was in a house where the children had caught a rat in a cage. I
asked them what they would do with the rat. "We will just put
him out in the sun," they said, "and he will die in a short
time." The creature that can adapt to sewers and filth and germs
of every kind cannot endure the sun.
"But
whoever lives according to the truth comes into the light so that
it can be clearly seen that the works have been done in God."
The great, mysterious, frightening truth of God needs to be brought
into the light. It is always there like the sunlight behind the clouds.
Just as it is often hard for us to believe in the sunlight during
a typhoon, so too it is often hard to believe in God's love in times
of calamity.
Meditation
is a process that develops a third eye. It helps us not so much to
see different things, but to see everything differently. In stillness
we remove our own shadows - our own words, ideas and images - that
keep getting in the way of our being in the presence of God's love.
In stillness we gradually expose our darker inner selves to the sunlight
of God's love where our vicious selves die like rats. In meditation
we come to know a God who was willing to give his life for us, like
the boy in our story, that we may know his love in a world that makes
no sense outside of this paradoxical life; a life that brings life
out of death as the morning brings light out of darkness.
